Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Sigh… I seriously can’t comprehend statements like this. You act like every iPhone owner only knows and interacts with other iPhone owners!? It makes me mad as well, I know several people who owns Android phones, and it IS seriously annoying that I have to use other chat services to text them to come even close to the iMessage experience between iPhones. I know iOS holds a bigger share in the US, but it’s the same story here in Sweden. But there’s still like 40-45% Android owners in both of our countries. This is just Apple being Apple… Just look at USB-C… It took Europe (EU) basically forcing them to adopt it on the iPhones.
Exactly this. The experience is being degraded by Apple deliberately because it is in their own business interests to do so. They know what they're doing. To hell with us consumers who spend thousands of $€£ with them.
 
Only in the US IMessage is winning, for the vast majority of the earth population both RCS and IMessage are outdated, caveman technologies that people couldn’t care less about.

The true winner is WhatsApp

? In the US, WhatsApp and FB Messenger are “winning”. And iMessage is the gold standard that others should follow, if anything WhatsApp is outdated. There’s a reason everyone is trying to catch up to it, RCS and WhatsApp included.
 
  • Like
Reactions: FindingAvalon
Well in a way this is about the superiority of chat apps such as WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage over SMS. They all do the same thing, using your email and or phone number as a global ID with which other details are associated, allowing them to transfer rich sets of content over end-to-end encrypted channels.

But SMS has never really tried to catch up with those proprietary messaging protocols. They’ve been behind for a long time, and RCS is the first serious attempt in many years to formulate an open standard.

I don’t see any of the big proprietary players giving up their advantage to level the playing field with the smaller players. At least not voluntarily.

RCS is not SMS. SMS can not be upgraded. SMS exists on the paging line that keeps your phone connected to the tower it is on. There’s a whopping 140 bytes remaining on that paging line, and SMS allows for you to send 160 7-bit characters on each ping, consuming every remaining byte. RCS does not, will never, fit into that. It’s an OTT messaging service, like all the others. If you have RCS with no data connection, it sends an SMS.
 
I live in both camps. Typing this on a Pixel phone, a phone that also has iMessage thanks to 3rd party tools.

While I love the feature set of RCS, it isn't exactly prime time just yet.

  • People will drop out of group chats without actually intending to,
View attachment 2292202
  • End to end encryption drops for unknown reasons.
View attachment 2292201
  • Sometimes a single user can cause a chain reaction that just kills a chat, or unknowingly causes someone to be ghosted and miss a huge portion of a group conversation before mysteriously reappearing out of nowhere.
Can't count how many times I have dove into message settings on my device to see if my bone stock Pixel was causing an issue in RCS, or, reviewed screenshots of other people's devices to attempt and troubleshoot them .

RCS is great when it works, but gives me nightmares of 90s AOL messaging with a friend using an unreliable Internet connection.
I guess that tracks. The company that, by all regards, still doesn’t seem to value messaging all that highly* (and doesn’t seem to care as much about user experience) would deliver a technically deficient chat experience, wouldn’t they?

* I read an article yesterday about Google’s messaging failures that contrasted it with iMessage, Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp, and Salesforce’s purchase of Slack, particularly noting how Apple considered messaging a tent pole feature and how Facebook and Salesforce were willing to spend billions of dollars to buy existing messaging services, it’s clear that messaging just isn’t an all hands on deck priority for Google. A better way of putting it might be that Google’s corporate culture is like wrangling cats, it’s almost impossible to get everyone to work towards a cohesive common vision,
 
  • Like
Reactions: FindingAvalon
Exactly this. The experience is being degraded by Apple deliberately because it is in their own business interests to do so. They know what they're doing. To hell with us consumers who spend thousands of $€£ with them.
I wouldn’t say that the experience is being degraded by Apple. If anything, Apple does go to some measures to make stock MMS/SMS suck less. For one, large texts present as one text instead of being broken apart into multiple parts because they went over the character limit. Any suckiness in the MMS/SMS experience on iPhones is an inherent limitation of MMS/SMS. And base RCS would do little to address those points of suckiness, and apparently Google Messenger still fails to deliver anything that works as well on a technical and user experience level as iMessage (or even WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and the like). One gets the impression that the reason Google adopted RCS (other than to justify the Jibe purchase) was so they could have an ostensibly open standard to use as a cudgel against Apple, particularly in potential legal battles. (Mind you, the EU is the most likely to accept those kinds of standards based arguments, but iMessage has very little marketshare in Europe, and Europe also has a very strong anti-Google bias. So if Google were betting on the EU taking up this fight for them, they probably made a poor bet.)

RCS wasn’t really a thing at all prior to 2015, when Google decided to buy Jibe. And RCS wasn’t really a thing within Google until 2019. And base RCS is lacking in features that we consider de rigeur today, because it’s a 2008 standard. Basically, it’s a standard that predates the smartphone boom, so the base RCS experience is only marginally better than MMS (somewhat better support for group chats than MMS, somewhat better media codexes). There have been updates that have added more features, but it still lags behind most chat platforms today (especially with regards to support of non-phone and SIM-less devices*, even in Google Messages). And the only real implementation of RCS anymore is Google’s Jibe service, with the Google Messages feature built on top of RCS using an over-the-top approach.

* Despite having a robust account system, Google’s been doing a lot of this using a phone number as an identifier business as part of their next billion users initiatives (particularly in India, since they’re banned in China). See Allo and the new Google Pay. Works well in the developing world, not so much in the developed world.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: FindingAvalon
RCS is not SMS. SMS can not be upgraded. SMS exists on the paging line that keeps your phone connected to the tower it is on. There’s a whopping 140 bytes remaining on that paging line, and SMS allows for you to send 160 7-bit characters on each ping, consuming every remaining byte. RCS does not, will never, fit into that. It’s an OTT messaging service, like all the others. If you have RCS with no data connection, it sends an SMS.
I suppose that’s true enough, but it certainly also applies to MMS. MMS certainly isn’t using a 160 byte channel, yet we do lump it in with SMS. By that metric, yeah, RCS would technically be OTT, as well. But presumably there’s some special allowances for MMS in terms of cellular bandwidth that would also exist for RCS had the carriers managed to nail the landing and not fumble the whole thing and let Google control their whole RCS stack (and add OTT features on top of RCS).
 
I can't see any way of Apple supporting (Google's) RCS without a very awkward UX implementation, or seriously damaging their privacy commitments.

If I'm in an iMessage group chat with 5 friends and one of them wants to invite another (Google RCS) friend, instantly that chat becomes available to Google. So what does Apple do? Warn all users (similar to an insecure HTTP connection)? Should a "voting" UI pop-up, needing an unanimous decision before they're allowed in? An Apple disclaimer that their privacy commitments no longer apply?

No thanks. I'd rather continue using a combination of iMessage and Whatsapp.

This also happens today once you include an SMS-only user in a message group chat. After that, all of your e2e messages in the group chat is sent unencrypted to your telco and the receiver's telco.
 
Since “all others” is basically Blink, you might as well liberally use the blink tag, as well.
Exactly! Blue for me, green for everyone else.

(Does Blink even support the blink tag? Hm, sounds like I need to do some research. Edit: Sadly, it doesn’t, and it looks like it never did, despite being the perfect Google April Fools joke.)
test.gif
 
Last edited:
I want RCS, but not Google’s proprietary RCS which is unfortunately the only thing currently on the market.
Google just uses universal profile and it isn't proprietary. You folks just never actually learn about things so you? The only reason Google's Jibe service is used is because it makes it much easier to spin up instances of RCS to use.

The platform is interoperable with third party things and is open largely. RCS is meant to be a replacement for SMS and Google has nothing at all to do with it's design as it is handled by the GSMA.
 
What no [blink]{blink}[/blink] in Blink?
Nope, alas. Wikipedia notes that Safari/WebKit never supported the blink element, which means that Blink (despite the name) never supported it unless it was added as a deliberate joke, and I have no evidence they ever did.
 
Usual Samsung hypocrisy. Nothing to see here folks. Noting is stopping them from writing messaging apps that interface with iMessage. Other companies can do it. Oh but it is more fun to pretend it is an issue. Other examples:

Everyone wants a foldable phone that cracks
Oh look, we have lots of teeny tiny pixels in our cameras. Oh, wait the photography experts say they are actually not quite as good as iPhone cameras. What, what?
Our Exynos chips are just as good as apple silicon. What, they are not even as good as Qualcomm, who knew? (Ok, that is not fair, there is nothing wrong with Qualcomm SOCs - still a little slower than AS, but not by enough to matter)
 
Imagine if the web was divided that way. We’d have blue web pages that only work on WebKit, and green web pages for which WebKit only supports basic text rendering. And Apple wouldn’t allow linking to a green web page from a blue web page. Or maybe rather, show five security warnings: “Do you really want to visit that unsafe green web page?”
HAHAHA. Really funny, but not even close to an accurate analogy
 
Google just uses universal profile and it isn't proprietary. You folks just never actually learn about things so you? The only reason Google's Jibe service is used is because it makes it much easier to spin up instances of RCS to use.

The platform is interoperable with third party things and is open largely. RCS is meant to be a replacement for SMS and Google has nothing at all to do with it's design as it is handled by the GSMA.
No, Google Messages adds features like encryption on top of RCS that aren’t part of the Universal Profile. This is a well established fact. In use, Google Messages is not Universal Profile RCS, and so, many of the features people want from an SMS/MMS replacement aren’t available from RCS. Google’s ability to add such features to RCS seems to be because it controls the telcom infrastructure for RCS (via Jibe) and the most popular implementing application.

To be honest, this tendency to gloss over the difference between the feature sets of Jibe and Messages seems disingenuous. The feature people want more than anything, encryption, isn’t available via Jibe and likely cannot be implemented via a carrier based model.
 
  • Like
Reactions: FindingAvalon
Apple has to be laughing their asses off knowing Google/Samsung are wasting money on ads that Apple doesn't care about in the slightest... lol.
 
  • Like
Reactions: OneBar
It's so shocking how people here are genuinely opposed to better interactions between iPhones and Androids. I don't understand that. SMS is terribly limited and outdated, and not E2E encrypted. And it's not like Androids are going away, so why keep the experience this bad on iMessages?

Not that I think this ad campaign will have any effect on Apple at all, but that doesn't mean that Apple should do nothing on improving communication standards on iPhone
How is a green message button a bad experience? and who cares? If you want android and your friends are on Android, this literally has no meaning for you
 
No, Google Messages adds features like encryption on top of RCS that aren’t part of the Universal Profile. This is a well established fact. In use, Google Messages is not Universal Profile RCS, and so, many of the features people want from an SMS/MMS replacement aren’t available from RCS. Google’s ability to add such features to RCS seems to be because it controls the telcom infrastructure for RCS (via Jibe) and the most popular implementing application.

To be honest, this tendency to gloss over the difference between the feature sets of Jibe and Messages seems disingenuous. The feature people want more than anything, encryption, isn’t available via Jibe and likely cannot be implemented via a carrier based model.
Furthermore, I trust Amazon and Meta more than I trust Google, and that’s saying something. I don’t want unencrypted texts going through Google infrastructure. So Jibe is a non-starter for me because of its corporate owner.

Truthfully, group MMS works well enough for me. Granted, I mostly use it for chatting with my family, and we generally don’t use it for video or detailed photos*, and I don’t typically use it for very large groups. The one annoyance is adding or removing people, which was an issue until my youngest brother finally got proper phone service (Google Fi’s implementation of MMS caused some issues with group chat, actually it’s possible that Google Fi doesn’t actually implement MMS and only supports SMS). It did mean that we had to start a new conversation chain, alas. But we’re not adding and removing numbers frequently, so that’s usually not a problem. Chat reactions could work better via MMS, though they’re tolerable as is, and it would take both Apple and Google to support the others’ implementation of chat reactions via MMS.

* When one of us wants to share an image or video, often we want to share it with our mom who doesn’t have a smartphone but does have Facebook Messenger (and iMessage, since she has an iPad, though it would probably be difficult to get her to make the switch over to iMessage even if we all had iPhones). Now obviously, lacking a cell phone number, Google Messages/RCS is a complete non-starter for her.
 
Google just uses universal profile and it isn't proprietary. You folks just never actually learn about things so you? The only reason Google's Jibe service is used is because it makes it much easier to spin up instances of RCS to use.

The platform is interoperable with third party things and is open largely. RCS is meant to be a replacement for SMS and Google has nothing at all to do with it's design as it is handled by the GSMA.
You can “well, technically!” about this all day, but in the end the result is the same. All messages sent from a hypothetical RCS equipped iPhone to an android of any variety would go through a Google server. Clearly nobody on that side of the pond cares about making their own servers.
 
  • Like
Reactions: kc9hzn
Also, I'm happy with Apples communications standards, thanks. Keep them as far away from Googles hands and their spyware.
Yes let's just stick with an outdated and unsecure communication protocol based on your unproved assumption that Google scans all its messaging platforms. Maybe you should look at the definition of end-to-end encryption (I'll give you a hint, SMS doesn't support E2EE).
 
How is a green message button a bad experience? and who cares? If you want android and your friends are on Android, this literally has no meaning for you
Did you ever try to manage a group with at least one green bubble friend? Or tried to send high quality pictures? Or maybe you just want your green bubbles to have end-to-end encryption? SMS is terrible, and iPhone users have to deal with that constantly (maybe not in the US, but shockingly, there are other people on this planet). It's as bad of an experience for Apple users than it is for Android users. So to your question, I care, even if I have no intention to move to Android
 
Last edited:
Makes you wonder if this would actually be an issue if Google didn’t intend to scrape all texts going through its service for the purposes of training LLM chat bots.
 
  • Like
Reactions: icanhazmac
It is NOT a Google Standard, it is a GSMA standard. But the network cartels couldn’t make money off of it. It only seems like a Google standard because Google is now the only one implementing and pushing for it because they failed after decades of floundering to establish their own locked in messaging system.

The base facts are easily verified with a five minute Google search. Try starting with the Wikipedia page for RCS.
It’s not a Google standard per se, but it’s as much a Google standard as HTML was a Microsoft standard during the bad old days of IE6 (or as it is today in terms of email HTML and Outlook). All the telecoms have outsourced their implementations to Google, so it controls the infrastructure, and it controls the most popular RCS aware platform/app. In practice, it’s Google driving the standard.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.